The Ghost Machine: A Terrifying and Uncanny Haunted House Thriller! (Ludo Carstairs Supernatural Thrillers Book 3) Read online

  The Ghost Machine

  Ludo Carstairs Supernatural Thrillers

  F.R. Jameson

  Published by F.R. Jameson, 2023.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  THE GHOST MACHINE

  First edition. April 10, 2023.

  Copyright © 2023 F.R. Jameson.

  Written by F.R. Jameson.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  To Vicky and Elise, with love, always....

  Prologue

  The first time I met Verity Wain, she still had both eyes. The pair of them regarded me with desperation, a frantic hope that I’d be able to do something – anything – to help her.

  She half-opened the door to her hotel room, a grey robe apparently having been hurriedly thrown on. Her green gaze was wide – under a mess of red hair – and it met mine, holding it, scrutinizing me. Then she sniffed. Apparently needing more confirmation than the visual that I was truly there. So she tried to catch my odour and might even have reached out to poke me, but sight and sound combined were enough to convince her of the veracity of my existence. Either I’d put on too much, or too little, deodorant that morning.

  All of her gestures expansive, she stepped back and threw open the door, beckoned me into a hotel room which was going to require many hours of overtime from the cleaning staff. Clothes and bottles were strewn from one corner to the next. I didn’t know exactly for how long she’d been staying there, but there were distilleries with fresher aromas. I hesitated to enter.

  “Have you seen any dead people?” she asked. Her accent was English, rather than Irish.

  “Today?” I blinked at her. “I don’t think so. Not yet anyway.”

  She grabbed at my sleeve and yanked me through the door. The momentum was so powerful she nearly toppled and I nearly toppled on top of her. But with her spare arm she didn’t steady herself, instead she slammed the door behind me. We stumbled together into the centre of the room.

  “Every old hotel in Dublin is an obvious nightmare.” She spoke fast and frantic. “There’s too much history in Dublin, and even if no one particularly famous died in a hotel, it nevertheless gives the ghosts something to cling onto. They like to think they’re part of a thing. They have fabric they can clutch. That’s why I came here, to this new-build, to this place of red brick with no history whatsoever. But do you know what the problem is?”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “People die in hotels!” Each word was given emphasis. “They’re on holiday and they eat too much for dinner and have a heart attack in their sleep. Or they go to Temple Bar, or wherever the hell, and drink fifteen pints of the black stuff, then choke on their vomit. Or they fall in the bathroom and crack their heads and their brains slowly bleed out all night long. Or they kill themselves. Like in the song, Heartbreak Hotel. Or they’re old and simply die. People don’t want to admit it, certainly hotel chains don’t want to admit this, but there are too many deaths in hotels for anyone to truly feel comfortable in them.”

  Verity Wain reached around to the vanity table and grabbed a large supermarket bottle of Tequila, then grimaced when she saw it was empty. The back of her hand went instinctively to her nose and she sniffed against it. There was nothing there though, not even residuals of white powder.

  As I say, she had the two eyes the first time I met her, and they shone emerald green. Both constantly filled with tears and nervous excitement. She had to be near forty, but was as lithe and slender as she’d been as a young woman. Her face was harder, however. It was built up from a square jaw; with wide cheekbones, a high forehead and broad nose. I imagined, with her teeth clenched, she would appear as stern as any demon headmistress. But in a more comfortable repose, she’d be quite striking. Genuinely beautiful. Certainly, when I’d seen the photos of her as a younger woman, she had been phenomenally attractive. As it was, this afternoon – with her auburn red hair wild and all her movements jumpy – she resembled a heroine who needed saving from herself.

  “So you’re seeing dead people?” I asked. Stepping away from her and gazing around the room, trying to find any clue as to what all this might be about.

  “Not in this room, no. Not yet. But I see them in the corridors. I see them on the streets. I see them, of course, at my damned home. That’s why I had to get away from there. That’s why I found this new-build hotel. I wanted to go for a time without seeing dead people. But it only works if I stay trapped and locked in this room. I think the next-door room is already haunted. Or else, there’s a very old man with yellowy eyes staying there.” Verity stepped closer to me, grabbing all my attention. “I thought there were supposed to be two of you.”

  I smiled. “My partner was unavoidably detained.”

  It was true. Ludo Carstairs had been roped in hurriedly to a different mission.

  “But I’m here and my name is Michael Garris,” I continued.

  She nodded once.

  “Garris. That’s a good name. And Michael has always been a name I can trust.”

  Her entire being moved in, so close she was practically pressed against me; fingers grabbing my arm and stroking down it. This was a couple of months before I met Beryl, my girlfriend. At the point I first saw Verity Wain in the flesh, I was very single, and even in her heightened state she was definitely attractive. But I was a professional and wasn’t going to make such a mistake in a situation like this.

  As gently as I could, I moved backwards.

  “We could sit.” She pointed at the unmade bed. “Or lie. Or whatever.” But as she said the words, she was losing interest. Whatever had happened between us was a flicker rather than a spark.

  I neither sat, nor lay. Instead l leant my hand to the wall above the bedside table and regarded her in her too big hotel dressing gown.

  “You made contact with us,” I said. “Sent us a message. How did you do that?”

  The Organisation, the body Ludo Carstairs and I worked for, was highly secret. So the fact Verity Wain had not only managed to learn of our existence, but had contrived to contact us had sent various alarm bells clanging. She’d swiftly become a person of interest. A file was compiled on her – an actual paper copy, making it much harder to corrupt – where we tried to get a sense of her before any meeting went ahead. There was a lot in the file, but on the face of it, very little to interest us. I think I was chosen to meet her because it wasn’t considered a high enough priority to send anyone else. Or maybe it was because I was so junior I couldn’t say no; while everyone who could say no opted out of what was most probably a waste of time. Whatever the true reason, it was me who got the tap on the shoulder and the return tickets from Heathrow to Dublin.

  “You know who I am, don’t you?” she said, a hint of manic laughter in her voice.

  “We’ve looked into you,” I admitted.

  “Ha! You don’t need to look into me. I’m a Picasso twin. People still bloody remember me. If it’s not dead people, it’s people who won’t let the past go.” The crazed guffaw burst forth. “I guess those two things are much the same, aren’t they? I get people stopping me. Talking to me about it. Telling me I should go and get them again. Whatever the hell that means.”

  The Picasso Twins had earned masses of news coverage twenty years earlier. I was a younger teenage boy then and so hadn’t followed the ins and outs of the scandal closely, but I could remember Verity’s face in the newspapers. And how striking and model-esque she had been. There was a particular picture, where she was wearing a chic black cocktail dress, hanging on the thinnest of straps. She was slim, young and gorgeous. But what caught my attention was the dismissive expression on her face, and how it made her appear more glamorous. No doubt she was the most beautiful woman at whatever party she was at. Possibly the most beautiful woman anywhere in New York City at that point. But she couldn’t have cared less. It struck me as a teenager in the English countryside as a wonderfully provocative and cosmopolitan attitude, and I’d never forgotten the image.


  “Is what happened in New York all those years ago relevant to now?” I asked.

  “No.” She caught herself. “Well, my brother is involved, but this isn’t Picasso Twins stuff. Not really.”

  “What is it then?” I asked. “I’m assuming your messages to us were deliberately cryptic.”

  “Vague and designed to intrigue? Yes,” she nodded. “But they worked, didn’t they? You’re here, aren’t you? Even if there’s only one of you.”

  “Indeed I am, so what can I do to help?”

  She spun around the room, hunting again for a full bottle. There didn’t appear to be any. That meant she either had to go outside (which I didn’t think she was going to do), or call room service – but who knows what else she might let in?

  “I want you to do something about my brother,” she announced.

  “Your brother?”

  There was only one sibling. Wilberforce, by name. But, despite the label they’d been given, they weren’t actually twins. She was older by eighteen months.

  “Yes, he needs to be dealt with.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s he done? How does it relate to us?”

  Verity glanced quickly over both shoulders, as if someone had spoken behind her. Fearing perhaps that one of the ghosts had penetrated her sanctum.

  “Bad things,” she said. “He is doing bad things. Things which most definitely fall within your remit.”

  “What things?”

  An angry pout altered her features, at the same time her whole being tensed and her arms wrapped around herself.

  “What falls within your remit?” she almost yelled. “Bad things, unholy things, things concerning the dead. He is taking us towards our doom!”

  “But what do you mean?” I asked. “If I’m going to do anything, if The Organisation is going to act, we need to be aware what it is.”

  Her frustration came as a snarl. “Make him tell you all the stuff he’s doing. Take him in, grab hold of him, and force him to confess. He may be more boastful than a heavyweight boxer, but he’s a coward underneath. If you lock him in one of your cells, or whatever on earth you have, then he’ll crack in no time. Question him, demand your answers, and you’ll have all the details in no time.”

  “I can certainly talk to him,” I began. I was going to point out I didn’t know what to ask, but she interrupted me.

  “No!” she screamed. “Don’t go around for a cup of tea and biscuits and a chat, pretending everything is normal. He’ll lie to you, he’ll charm you. You’ll walk away with no idea of the depths he’s sunk to. You have to take him in, put pressure on him, make him crack open and give you every sordid secret he keeps in his breast.”

  I paused, waiting for her to calm, but not sure if it was possible as she seemed to be getting angrier with every breath.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I told her at last.

  “Good!” she barked. “You get on it. Call who you need to call, fill in whatever paperwork you need and take him.” She grabbed hold of the dregs of another bottle. “And when you do, I’ll get the house, won’t I? I mean, you won’t need it for anything?”

  The question hung between us. “I honestly don’t know,” I said. “Is there a reason you think we might need the house?”

  “No, but it will be my house. Once he’s gone, it will be like he himself is dead, won’t it? So after you have him, I’ll get the house and any assets.”

  I tried to choose my words as carefully as possible. “Is he doing what you say he’s doing – whatever that might be – inside the house?”

  “Yes,” she snapped, “but it’s irrelevant. There are other factors in play than just the house.”

  “So why are you bringing up the house?”

  “Because that’s where he’s doing it!” The exasperation was spread thick through her voice. “But it’s nothing to do with the house. In fact, the whole place would be best knocked down. Put a housing estate there. Let others live on the land. For the right price, I’ll sell.”

  I was completely lost in this conversation and hadn’t a notion how to get back onto a path which would lead to somewhere which made sense. All I could do was grab onto any frayed edge and hope for the best.

  “But if your brother is communing with the dead – if that is indeed what he’s doing – then it could be they are wedded to the house. A lot of ghosts are fixed to specific geographic locations.”

  “Don’t I know it!” she yelled. “I’m just glad no bastard has died in this room.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying your brother is up to, so I can’t tell you what the consequences will be. Nor do I have any idea whether we’ll need to at least look at the house. You’ll need to tell me a bit more, I’m afraid, before I can hazard a guess as to what we might do.”

  Verity Wain spun a full circle on the spot and screamed to herself. “What are you saying? You can take him, but you’ll have to take our house too? That isn’t fair. It’s our house. It’s as much mine as it is his!”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.” I kept my voice as reassuring as possible. “But it might be – from what you say – when we speak to your brother, the house is a material part of what he’s doing. It’s an old house as I understand it, isn’t it? A castle, apparently, or called a castle. One which has been in your family for generations. Is it a haunted house?”

  She ignored my question. “It’s the box! Not the house!”

  “What box?” I asked.

  But she again ignored me, stifling a sob, the aggression fading to be replaced by something close to vulnerable. “I want him gone. I want him out of there. I want what he’s doing finished.”

  “I’ll be happy to speak to him.”

  “Not if you’re going to take the house you don’t! I will make such a fuss if you charge in and try to take our house.”

  “Miss Wain,” I said, my hands placating in front of me. “You invited me here. I didn’t know about any of this until today. I still don’t understand it. Why don’t I go and talk to your brother? Try to fully understand what he’s doing. Then once I do, we can get together and determine what the next steps might be.”

  She glared at me, a gaze harsh and pitying and full of tears. “You know what, forget I said a word. If you can’t do anything about my brother, then I’ll have to. I’m not losing the house. You’re not taking it from me. Do you understand?”

  And then she charged away from me and did the one thing I couldn’t imagine her doing. She yanked open the door and dashed through. Braving the ghosts and the outside, and leaving behind her clothes, her make-up, various detritus and – it later transpired – a hefty unpaid bill.

  It was an odd and unsettling encounter, and the rest of my brief time in Dublin was spent pondering whether I should have said something else, or done something different. But I honestly couldn’t decide what the alternative course might have been.

  Back in London, after a long discussion with The Chief, it was decided we’d do no good charging into the Wain residence. We had no idea what Wilberforce Wain was supposedly up to, after all. The file stayed open, but more for background. As often happened, I meant to check in with Verity Wain, but other cases arrived on my desk and other dangers appeared. I only had so much time, and we only had so many resources.

  Then, a year later, another communication arrived from the Wain siblings of Killamurray.

  This time both Verity and her brother wanted to speak to us.

  Chapter One

  “Do you ever get the impression you’re being watched, Garris?” asked Ludo Carstairs. He didn’t lower his voice, nor express any alarm. His tone was kept calm and conversational, but his blue eyes narrowed ever so slightly as he stared across to the other side of the public bar.

  My back was to whoever he was talking about. So I had to follow his gaze as subtly as possible. Fortunately, on the wall beside me was a wide mirror. A bit smoky in the glass and with a chipped illustration of a leprechaun in the bottom right corner, but I could lean in my chair and take in the full panorama of the pub.

  There were two of them, sat at the bar itself, having ordered pints of Guinness, which were served in tall glasses. Both of them had their fingers curled around the bottom of their pint, but it felt like neither had any actual idea what to do with those drinks. As if their very appearance had surprised the men. Instead, they were looking away from the bar and the barman and the drinks. Ludo was right. They were doing their best to hide it, but they were concentrating on us.